Our fee is proportional to the time & money saved by streamlining a repeating task, which guarantees that you will receive a return on investment. 

For each project, we analyze the time you’re spending on a task over the course of a year, and how much of that time we can give you back by automating or streamlining it. Our fee is proportional to the savings. We will show you all of these numbers before you approve a project, so it’s transparent and clear what your investment is vs. what your savings will be. If we look at your project and determine there’s not enough savings to justify our services, we’ll also let you know. It may be the task is too small to automate or isn’t making enough impact on your organization to justify our services.

We may apply an hourly fee for certain smaller projects, where we are not automating a recurring or large tasks, but helping you solve a small one-time issue.

Let’s pretend that you have a successful brick & mortar retail business and have decided to add eCommerce to your operations. You currently have an inventory of approximately 1,000 products which need to be moved into your new eCommerce system. You have the basic details about these products listed in your current POS system (namely, SKU, title and price), but the new eCommerce system requires more information (description, photos, weight, color, etc.) Your manufacturers are not able to provide the data you need for you, so your current plan is to visit the manufacturer’s website(s) to obtain information and photos, and then manually copy all of the information into the new eCommerce system.

Assuming it takes you 15 minutes per product to grab the information from these websites, format it, crop photos, and upload everything to your eCommerce system, you’re looking at 15,000 minutes, or 250 hours of solid work to complete this task. You decide to task one of your sales associates to assist with this, who you are currently paying $18.50 per hour (for the purpose of this example, we’ll assume your employer costs like EI are included in this rate.) At 250 hours, this task is going to cost you $4,625 in wages to complete. But don’t forget, you’re not only paying for the wages to do this work, but losing that associate off your floor. If you bring in another associate to cover them, you may potentially double that cost to $9,250. Or, if you run under-staffed during this time, you may lose sales due to customers not being helped as effectively (this is what we refer to as an opportunity cost – the cost of losing existing sales opportunities to a lower-value task.)

Let’s also look at calendar / project time. Assuming your sales associate works 37.5 hours per week, and can dedicate all of their time to this task without interruptions, it will take them approximately 6.6 weeks to populate the catalog. However, if they are not able to dedicate their time solely to this task (you need them on the floor helping customers as well), it would take much longer. Let’s say they can dedicate 2 hours of the day, their morning before lunch, to do it. At that rate, it would take 25 weeks, or approximately 6 months, to populate the catalog. In either case, your eCommerce project will be stalled with your agency until the catalog is populated, delaying your project and potential creating other costs as well.

So as it stands, you’re facing a minimum cost of $4,625 (which is likely much higher with opportunity costs factored in), and a project delay of anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 months to complete your new eCommerce website.

Enter Automate & Conquer:

1. We investigate your POS system and discover a way to export some of the inventory data. We are able to extract the SKU, title, and price of each item.
2. Next, we create a script to automatically scrape the product information from the manufacturer websites. It’s able to enrich the info with a description, category, size, weight, as well as download and crop all of the product photos.
3. We then make a script to clean up and format all of the records in the way your eCommerce system needs.
4. We deliver the spreadsheet and files to your agency. We work with them to ensure the data can import correctly and fix any small issues or errors in the formatting, and they move on with importing the catalog and finishing your website.

Boom. You have the data ready to go in 1-2 weeks and for less than what it would cost for you to do manually. Your associates can continue helping customers the entire time, keeping your sales numbers up, and you free up your own time to prepare additional content for your new website, like your privacy & returns policy. You’re months ahead of where you were going to be and a heck of a lot happier knowing you avoided all that mind-numbing data entry.

We are not a replacement for your Business Process Improvement (BPI) role. We are a complement to these roles, as a specialist resource to help them achieve their goals. We specialize in the tech side of automating data entry & processing tasks, connecting apps, and improving digital workflows. This can be used to remove roadblocks, improve the accuracy & quality of service delivery, and reduce inefficiency and wasted resources.

For example, let’s say your BPI role determines that the sales team is being slowed down by inefficient web-based project management software. It has many screens and requires much more clicks than it should to add a new opportunity or track a new client’s information. As a result, the sales team is becoming frustrated, missing steps, or even avoiding the task altogether – which is causing production inefficiencies and problems with projects down the line. Your BPI would bring us in to explore several approaches to streamline this process, such as:

• Connecting your company website to your CRM/software system to import leads directly, removing the need for manual entry altogether.
• Creating macros in the salespersons browser which will automate part or all of the process, reducing the tediousness of using the software.
• Investigating the software and how its being used, and suggesting alternative, faster ways to achieve their tasks.